BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer

In Addicted to Love, writer Robert Gordon and director Griffin Dunne take a chance on making romantic heroes out of two embittered dumpees.

Characters like this can be funny -- and they are for a respectable portion of Addicted -- but they're not very romantic.

Even when they fall for one another, as we know they must, they've been so screwed up and so mean for most of the movie that it's hard to imagine their new love affair will go anywhere except down the tubes.

Most of the story follows Sam, a trusting astronomer, and Maggie, an angry photographer, after they team up in a squalid abandoned building to spy on their respective exes.

Addicted to Love ** (R; profanity, implied sex) Meg Ryan, Matthew Broderick. Directed by Griffin Dunne. 102 minutes. National Amusements, Showplace 8, Danbarry Middletown.

Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan play the spies; Kelly Preston and Tcheky Karyo play Linda and Anton, the spied-upon. All are talented actors, yet only Mr. Karyo seems to grasp his character with clarity.

Ms. Ryan has the toughest job; Maggie must destroy her ex-lover's life with brutal calculation and simultaneously win a new lover (and presumably the audience) with her wit, brains and emotional transparency. Ironically, Ms. Ryan, a born charmer, is at her most convincing in this movie when she's being inscrutably cruel.

Mr. Broderick is winning, for the most part, and Ms. Preston does what she can with a character so emotionally fastidious she sends her father to read ''Dear John'' letters to the men she discards.

Mr. Dunne earns major points for the charm of his deft, intelligent visual approach, built around distorted sight. Cameras, telescopes, mirrors, windows, helmets, magnifying glass, even the back of a spoon appear. The central device is Sam's camera obscura, an old-fashioned contraption that casts a magnified view of Linda and Anton's apartment on the wall.

Those stolen images provide a focus for the tangled emotions on display. Early on, Sam slowly paints the wall white to throw Linda's picture into brighter relief, then converses with her form. Sam and Maggie watch the Anton-and-Linda show from a couch, as if it were a movie. Reflections loom over the spies and slide across their bodies.

The effect is intriguing, even thrilling at moments.

Alas, technique is not enough to make us cherish characters who've turned into psycho stalkers before our eyes.